February 8, 2017 – Time to let go

The painting I’m working on (bottom) and the reference image (top).

Two weeks ago four of us gathered at my mom’s office at the end of the day to take Hallelujah, my really big painting, out of the frame and into a huge shipping tube.  Lissa Boles, my beloved coach, had claimed this one and the time had come to send Hallelujah on her way.  I’m glad my intuition guided me to make an event out of it.  A lot of emotion arose – tears even – at the reality of saying goodbye to this one.  Lissa lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada – not exactly down the road – so it’s possible I’ll never see it again.  Hallelujah was my first really big painting and it will hold a special place in the stream of art that is coming through me.  We’ve had it gracing our painting space in my mom’s office for the better part of the five years since I painted it.  Though I knew it was time for it to fly away – to bring light and color elsewhere – I also knew we will miss it terribly.

It was just a small group. Betsey, Virginie and Heather came.  They heard me tell about how it came to be – how my heart started to beat fast when I happened up on the big sheets of paper at Perry’s Art Supplies, how the image came from my friend Brenda’s kitchen table.  I shared how I guarded it from prospective buyers who didn’t “get” it – the way this big piece of art has been an anchor, a validation of something in me as artist.  I told of people it has touched – especially Lissa.  We had some nibbles and warm cups of tomato soup and then got to it. It took two of us to hoist it off the wall.  Then we ripped away the paper backing and, one at each corner, started digging out the dozens of staples that were holding it in the frame.  Big pieces of artwork are an order of magnitude greater to deal with – there are a lot of inches worth of staples and tape going all the way around them!

When we took it out of the frame and flipped it over, still mounted on its backing, I put my hand on it for the first time since taking it to the framer.  These paintings are real things to me – I spend so many hours with them, with so much of my attention and focus – all the while my hands are all over them. Once framed, they transform – they become something more, but they also become less intimate to me, their creator.  My creations and I are separated by the framing.  There it was again – this thing I spent a very sweaty August on – I was bound and determined to finish in time for the Sausalito Art Festival on Labor Day weekend 2011.  It took three of us to roll the big, heavy paper tightly enough to fit into the 8” tube.  Not only was this a moment that my heart wanted to share, to mark intentionally, but I also really needed extra hands to do the job!

Just before I left to take the tube to the post office (left) and a picture Lissa sent me of the poem I wrote for her on the back of Hallelujah, safely in Toronto (right).

Entrusted to the care of the United States Postal Service and Canada Post, it took about a week to arrive safely in Lissa’s hands.  We left the spot where Hallelujah was hanging bare for a week, but now the wall has been re-hung with other art.  Its frame now awaits me to paint something else to put in it.  I captured an image of Monet’s pond at Giverny two autumns ago.  It is not so much about the lilies, but the blue-blue sky reflected in the water with the trees ablaze in fall colors around it.  This one wants me to paint it – hopefully sometime this year.  Moving on.  In marking Hallelujah’s departure, I feel very palpably the flow of art coming through me and into the world.

Monet’s pond in the autumn of 2015.

When my friend Eleanor Harvey invited me to join her in showing my work at Marin Open Studios coming up on 10 years ago, my first reaction was “oh, this means I have to sell my work, right?”  She gently said, “yes, my dear, this is the idea…”  In that moment, I had my first sense of this flow. Somehow, I intuitively understood that if I wanted for art to continue to come through, I had to be willing let it go.  Almost all just-starting-out artists hold their paintings very preciously.  I did too.  But after a while, especially if we paint consistently, and paintings begin to collect, there are at least some that we are happy to let go of.

I’ve encountered other kinds of artists along the way who seem to have little connection with their work, who have art stacked up and can’t wait be rid of it.  Though there is a very healthy and alive part of me motivated for my art to sell, and is very happy when it does, there has not been one single original painting that has left my hands that has not tugged at my heart.  It hasn’t become old hat – not one bit.  I have to believe that this is related to the connection we have to these paintings of ours – and what of us we put into them.  When paintings leave home, especially a big, important piece like Hallelujah, the space left behind has an energy, it’s a force.  It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum – this space is a vacuum that our creative nature abhors.  The energy is attractive – to re-fill itself.

The impetus to paint is very alive in me right now.  Joe and I are here on the island of Kauai for a couple of weeks.  I’m working on a short and wide painting of pearly-colored plumeria flowers, just after a rain (the picture up at the top).  It’s from an image I captured when we were here last year.  I’m lost in the “fuzzy background” at the moment, giving myself the treat of painting the soft pearly colors for last. Even on Kauai, where I could spend my time doing plenty else, I feel the need to be with my painting every day.

Not everyone is bound, or even aspires, to sell their artwork.  Painting for one’s own pleasure is a perfectly fine reason to spend the time doing so.  But things can happen, can evolve.  In the time I’ve spent with artists who have made painting a regular part of their lives – and have also taken advantage of the opportunity to show their work – I’ve witnessed this evolution.  Along with the tug that comes with letting a piece of art go is the affirming joy that someone else wants to make our creation a part of their lives – especially when it is someone who doesn’t already know and love us! In this is an exchange of energy, of life, of inspiration and appreciation that is hard to describe.  For me this feeling is so big and unexpected, even as it happens over and over, that I don’t know exactly where to put it inside me.  It is my hope that this feeling also never grows old either.

It’s very gratifying to even just finish a painting – there is such a sense of accomplishment.  But if and when we come to the place where we show our work, the amazing can happen: someone is touched by our work.  They feel something when viewing our work that we often didn’t intend or weren’t even aware of.  There is a transmission from us to them through our work.  What that something is exactly may not be communicated, but whenever someone buys a painting, it is there.

Holly’s painting: “Heaven Sent”.

Some of the 537 Magnolias have work in a new show at the Sausalito Presbyterian Church.  I received word that a member of the church was touched enough to buy a painting.  The first painting to sell was given the name “Heaven Sent” by the group – named by the group because it was Holly’s painting – our beautiful Holly who we lost last year.  She finished this painting of red-pink tulips just weeks before she passed away.  The person received her transmission even beyond her time here on earth.  I’m pretty certain we are not conscious of this when first touching brush to our paper – and if we did, it wouldn’t be the same.  We are just painting.  But when we come to the time to let go, we step into the flow.

With my love,

Cara